City Parks Officials Seek Safety Review of Synthetic Surfaces

Synthetic material covers a playing field at Riverside Park. Officials have asked the health department to investigate the material.Credit
Marko Georgiev for The New York Times

For more than a decade, the city’s Parks Department has extolled the environmental and safety benefits of replacing the grass or asphalt at dozens of its play spaces with synthetic material made from recycled tires, despite safety concerns expressed by some scientists and children’s advocates.

But on Tuesday, the department said it had asked the city health department to investigate potential health and safety problems associated with the synthetic material, even as it continued to insist the surfaces were safe.

“Understandably, there has been significant public interest in this issue, and we responded by asking the N.Y.C. department of health to look further into the issues,” the Parks Department said in a statement. “There is no public health danger at any of these fields.”

There are 77 synthetic fields across the city and 23 more under construction, according to the Parks Department.

The department said there were thousands of similar fields across the nation.

The vast majority of synthetic fields in the city, park advocates say, are constructed with shredded tires, though some, including the first artificial material used in the city in 1998, in Chelsea Park, are made with nylon.

For years, Adrian Benepe, the parks commissioner, has been a forceful advocate of the safety of turf fields made with shredded rubber.

Mr. Benepe has said the surfaces are safe to play on; have environmental advantages over natural surfaces, which require pesticides, watering and mowing; and are cheaper and easier to maintain than are grass fields.

“Synthetic fields, which are made of recycled rubber, may be more environmentally friendly than ‘natural’ grass fields, which require the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides and greenhouse-gas-producing machines for maintenance,” the Parks Department said in a news release two months ago.

But parents and many parks users have criticized the paving of city parks with artificial surfaces, a trend that has intensified during the past five years as the Parks Department has sought ways to increase the amount of playing space that can be used year round.

Critics said synthetic material creates “heat islands” in the summer because the surface absorbs sunlight and emits heat.

Researchers have also found that the rubber contains polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons — or PAHs — that may be carcinogenic. The question of how easily PAHs — which are also found in toys and other material — can be absorbed by the human body is a matter of dispute.

The Parks Department’s acknowledgment on Tuesday that it had asked the health department to study the synthetic material came just hours after a parks advocacy group, NYC Park Advocates, held a news conference at City Hall at which it distributed an internal Parks Department directive.

The directive seemed to suggest that the agency had banned the use of shredded rubber for new playing fields, at least temporarily.

It said that “effective immediately,” the department was “suspending the use of rubber infill synthetic turf in all parks capital projects.”

The Parks Department also took the unusual step of issuing a statement from the author of the directive, Amy Freitag, the department’s deputy commissioner of capital projects.

Ms. Freitag said that she had “incorrectly made a blanket statement” and that the department had in fact not changed its policy regarding the use of the rubber, but was seeking to use new technologies.

Geoffrey Croft, president of NYC Park Advocates, said the Parks Department should have studied the material in recycled tires long ago.

“The city should have conducted a full environmental review before putting more than 30 million pounds of potentially hazardous chemicals into parkland,” he said.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B3 of the New York edition with the headline: City Parks Officials Seek Safety Review of Synthetic Surfaces. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe